Horrors of the Forest

My apologies for not getting out the Conflict at the Carrock narrative. I was in a car accident a couple of days ago, and the recovery and fallout from that has rather impacted my focus. I had this post and video already ready to go, so I’m going to throw it out there. Further updates might get a little more sporadic for a bit – I’m also trying to prepare for NaNoWriMo. But I’m committing to having the narratives all the way through Return to Mirkwood finished by Nov. 1st. After that, the blog will be on hiatus until December.

After the rather anticlimactic turn our Dead Marshes playthrough took, I’m about ready for some more epic action in Return to Mirkwood, the final adventure pack in the Shadows of Mirkwood cycle.

Return to Mirkwood is a bear of a quest. It hits you from multiple angles and doesn’t let up. Brutal treacheries, killer threat raises, and ridiculous enemies are par for the course, as we face among the absolute worst enemies that Mirkwood has to offer.

And so, of course, our heroes are going to willingly subject themselves to the horrors of a Return to Mirkwood. Very good. Let’s move on to the deckbuilding and quest analysis.

We’ll start off with the link to our friendly neighborhood analysis blog, Vision of the Palantir. A lot of the detailed looks at the mechanics have already been done over there, so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Let’s just hit the highlights.

There are a number of extremely powerful enemies – Attercop, Attercop has 8 attack, the Hill Troll has 6, and Ungoliant’s Spawn has 5. So we will either need a stead stream of chump blockers or sufficiently powerful defenders to handle the attacks. At the least, we’ll need to consistently block attacks of 6. In addition, we’ll need to be able to dish out a lot of damage in a single turn – Attercop, Attercop will require 10 attack to kill in a single attack, while Ungoliant’s Spawn requires 11 and the Hill Troll takes 12.

Treachery cancellation will be another need to cover – most of the Tantrum treacheries are incredibly difficult to actually deal with, including direct damage, incredible threat raises, and discarding a fifth or more of our deck.

Direct damage is another trial this quest has to throw at us: not damage spread out among all characters, but targeted damage onto a single hero. The treachery Gollum’s Bite does 4 damage to a hero, and the Hummerhorns will do 5 if we are forced to engage them. And with the pressure on our threat dial, we will need to engage them. To counter this, we will need either hit point boosts or damage cancellation, with a side of healing.

The last, and most difficult, feature of the quest is the pressure on our threat dial. The player guarding Gollum will have a threat increase of 4 every round, and we will need to find some way to mitigate that if we want to have a chance at winning.

This is going to be difficult.

The good news is that this quest doesn’t put any significant pressure on our willpower – the average encounter card reveal is going to be roughly 2 threat. Some location control would be good, to deal with locations that have nasty travel effects, but we aren’t going to be too badly off in that regard.

A Ranger’s Skill

We’ve been using Aragorn in one form or another throughout much of this cycle, and for this quest there is an obvious choice. The Lore variant of the hero has the single most powerful threat reduction effect in the game – it’s essentially an auto-include against this quest. With Loreagorn, we can run our threat up while guarding Gollum, drop it back to our original starting value in the Refresh phase, and run it all the way back up again.

Of course, having a low starting threat value is going to be difficult with a 12 threat-cost hero in our lineup. Luckily, that’s where our next hero comes in. Mirlonde is a hero that is often underused, but she is a thematic home run here for this quest and setting. In addition, her threat reduction affects our starting threat, which means that she works well with Aragorn’s ability.

To maximize her ability, we want to bring a third Lore hero, and our theme strongly recommends that it be either a Dunedain ranger or a woodland realm Silvan character like Argalad. While that could be interesting, I’m going to go with a character we’ve met before in the narrative – Thurindir.

Now, I know that Vision of the Palantir recommends against using a side quest deck for Return to Mirkwood – it means that we are going to raise our threat significantly more for each side quest we complete. On the other hand, Aragorn will likely give us threat reduction powerful enough to compensate for that, and we can include more threat reduction besides.

One of the most useful threat reduction cards for this quest is going to be the Spirit ally Elfhelm. His response – lowering your threat by 1 every time the encounter deck raises it – is simply incredible in this quest. He’ll also give me some offensive punch, which will be necessary on the final stage of the quest, which requires me to kill every enemy in play.

Conveniently for our narrative, we just helped Elfhelm track down some Orc horse thieves and recover some stolen horses. It is not beyond the realm of reasonability to think that Elfhelm might willingly come with us to offer his services in whatever way he can to repay us.

Of course, I don’t have the sphere match necessary to get him into play. While I could include him in Eleanor’s Spirit/Tactics deck, that wouldn’t let this deck reduce its threat, which is what I’m really after. I don’t really intend to move Gollum around much, instead focusing a great deal of threat reduction onto a single deck. So, in order to get Elfhelm into play, we’ll include 3 copies of Elf-Stone. Now, to guarantee that we will see him, we are going to use a neat trick that running Thurindir opens up. Both of our decks are going to run Gather Information, and during setup, Thurindir will fetch the copy in the Lore deck and add it to our hand. Upon clearing that side quest, we will fetch the other copy of Gather Information out of Eleanor’s deck, while fetching the single copy of Elfhelm our deck has in it. On the second turn, we will use the second Gather Information to fetch an Elf-stone, if we haven’t already drawn one, and from then on, we’ll be in business. This is the real reason for including Thurindir and taking the risk of running side quests – he makes fetching combo pieces just so reliable, and Elfhelm is worth the delay.

Now, to look at additional threat reduction effects. Lore recently got its first useful option in the form of the Woodman’s Clearing, a 0-cost location attachment that drops the first player’s threat by 3 after we clear the attached location. In addition to that, we can run 3 copies of Gandalf, and 3 copies of the Song of Kings to enable us to run Sneak Attack, for yet further threat control. One further option will be to run a copy of Double Back in Eleanor’s deck. We can use the second Gather Information to fetch it to clear on turn 3 (hopefully), thus reducing both decks threat by 5.

That is a lot of threat reduction, and we may well need all of it and more by the end. But threat reduction isn’t the only thing we are going to need in this quest, so let’s flesh out the deck a little bit. I’m going to need a strong defender, which will probably be Aragorn. He won’t be able to stand up against a hit from Attercop, Attercop, but I can beef him up enough to stand against a Hill Troll or Ungoliant’s Spawn. With a Burning Brand and Protector of Lorien on him, he becomes quite sturdy. In addition, Protector of Lorien can be used to boost Eleanor’s defense in the other deck; if we find a Gondorian Shield and boost her with Arwen, she could defend for up to 8 on either side of the table, which is enough to stop Attercop, Attercop cold.

But in addition to the strong defender, we will also want some chump blockers to give us an alternate route to dealing with the Attercop. To that end, we’ll include 3 copies of the Dunedain Lookout. As a chump blocker, it’s a little bit expensive, but much better than taking 8 attack on an unprepared hero. In addition, we can use his discard ability to cancel the When Revealed effect of Ungoliant’s Spawn – probably one of the nastiest effects in the deck. We can also discard him to avoid exhausting characters upon the reveal of a King Spider, which can potentially cause a loss due to undefended attacks.

In addition to the Lookout, the fact that we are including Leadership means that we can also include the one of the most cost-efficient chump blockers in the game, the Snowbourne Scout. And including Elfhelm means that we can reasonably include a few of his comrades, so I’m going to take advantage of that while I can.

Another useful Rohan ally to keep in mind is Gleowine. The only Rohan ally from the Lore sphere, he can be hard to include in dedicated Rohan decks because the Lore access is so difficult to come by. On the other hand, his card draw ability is just excellent – it’s essentially 2 cost to draw an extra card every round for the rest of the game. The flexibility to share card draw across the table is similarly helpful. Because I have Protector of Lorien, I’m willing to include 3 copies to make the draw more consistent – this deck needs to avoid stalling out, and we need card draw to do that.

Filling out our allies will be 3 copies of the East Road Ranger, who can offer 3 willpower to clear the side quests if we see her early, and 2 attack against enemies if we find her later; both useful traits in the Lore sphere. 2 copies of the Warden of Healing will help us recover from the ridiculous effects of either Gollum’s Bite or Hummerhorns (assuming we can cancel at least one point of the damage). And finally, 3 copies of the Ranger of Cardolan will round out the pack, giving us incredible flexibility. The response will allow us to defend an emergency attack, or even give us a blocker for the Hill Troll that won’t leave us raising our threat by 4.

We’ve already discussed a number of attachments that will boost our deck’s defensive capabilities, along with Elf-stone and Woodman’s Clearing, to tech against this quest’s pressure on our threat dial. The last 2 attachments we’ll include will be 3 copies of Wingfoot, to ready Aragorn after questing, and 2 copies of Athelas. This can help us completely clear off the damage from Gollum’s Bite or Hummerhorns (again, assuming we can cancel one point of damage to avoid hero death), and can additionally discard the Caught in a Web condition for us. Ideally, we’ll attach it to a Warden of Healing, to avoid the need to exhaust a hero for the effect, but Thurindir or any of the Dunedain allies are fair alternate targets.

That leaves us with events. In addition to Sneak Attack for Gandalf, we will include 9 card draw events: 3 copies of Deep Knowledge, 3 copies of Daeron’s Runes, and 3 copies of Mithrandir’s Advice. That should help significantly with our deck’s consistency.

Light of Dol Amroth

For our second deck, we will be back to comfortable and familiar territory. Lanwyn, Eleanor, and Thalin will constitute our hero lineup. Our allies will be likewise familiar. 2 copies of Rhovanion Outrider for location control and attack if needed, 3 copies apiece of Ethir Swordsman and Arwen Undomiel, 2 copies of Bofur, 3 copies of Honour Guard, and 3 copies of Defender of Rammas. That gives us a solid questing core, some defense, and damage cancellation for the board. Since we’re back in Mirkwood, we’ll add in 3 copies of the Woodland Courier and 2 copies of Legolas – he’s expensive, but we can bring him in via an Elf-Stone from the other deck, and his 3 ranged attack will be important in supporting our companion deck in combat.

Attachments will be practically unchanged from earlier editions of the deck: 2 Unexpected Courage, a Magic Ring, 3 Daggers of Westerness and 3 Gondorian Shields, 3 Ancient Mathoms, and the Black Arrow will complete the set. These are all part of the standard suite of attachments so far, and I see no need to include more for this quest.

The events will be a little more interesting, though. The treacheries are simply brutal in this quest, so we will definitely include 3 copies of A Test of Will, and we will also grab 2 copies of Hasty Stroke, just in case we see the shadow effect on Hummerhorns or Despair. Feint gives us a little protection against the most powerful enemies in the encounter deck, and Foe-hammer is important for card draw.

The most interesting choice, though will be 2 copies of Ride Them Down. The easiest way for this quest to end in disaster is to reveal an early copy of Attercop, Attercop, and watch our heroes die one by one to its 8 attack., because we cannot leave it in the staging area despite its high engagement cost. This event allows us to just delete one of these enemies from the staging area the turn we reveal it, avoiding ever having to engage it and deal with its attack. We certainly have other solutions – chump blockers and defense boosts for both Aragorn and Eleanor, along with Feints to cancel the attacks outright. But it pays to have multiple options to deal with the threat, and this could be exceptionally useful.

The last event we will include will be 3 copies of Well-Warned. This gives us just a little bit more threat reduction. We already have a great deal in the Lore deck, but against this quest, even that much might not be enough.

Finally, we will include 2 sidequests. Gather Information, to do our part in the Thurindir combo-piece finding chain, and Double Back, which will be our target for the second Gather Information. As I said, we may need even more threat reduction.

Looking back at our goals from the beginning of the post, we have included a lot of threat reduction, tools to defend or neutralize the attacks of high-powered enemies, and hopefully enough attack power to kill the enemies we engage. Between Lanwyn, Aragorn, Mirlonde, and Elfhelm (who we should have in the first turn or two), we can muster 10 attack to kill Attercop, Attercop. With a single Weapon, we can do the same to Ungoliant’s Spawn, and we only need 1 attack point more to kill a Hill Troll. We also have some damage cancellation to deal with the really concentrated effects in the quest, and healing to be able to tank those effects repeatedly if need be.

I think we’re ready to face the horrors of the forest.

These decks can be found on RingsDB here. Watch the playthrough on YouTube here!